Abstract
In the context of the Middle East, conventionally, ‘new media’ have been viewed as digital media that have emerged over roughly the past two to three decades. The advent of any new medium has always disrupted the affordances of existing media—a fact widely recognized in historically inflected media studies. My paper explores the illustrated magazine in interwar Egypt. In this case the form of the printed artifact itself necessitated novel reading practices; this made it both distinctive in the field of print culture, and legible by means used to analyze audiovisual and digital media. I explore the illustrated magazine through a close reading of a single issue of al-Ithnayn, a popular variety magazine from the mid-1930s; I show how such concepts as flow, remediation and hypertextuality help us understand the cultural and sensory impact of such materials, and particularly their key position between audiocentric and ocularcentric reading cultures. The significance of al-Ithnayn cannot be reduced to a generic instantiation of what had by that time become a global medium. It also expressed social tensions of its time and facilitated readers’ own negotiations with a broad emergence of new media beyond the magazine itself.
‘Print culture’ is often associated with a transition to modernity (Eisenstein 1979) and the emergence of nationalism (Anderson 1991).1 Although standardized languages and mass dissemination naturally seem to support the transparent communication required for rational-critical debate in a public sphere, public spheres are nonetheless better understood as contested fields shaped by disparities in access and complex, often unacknowledged, agendas for control rather than as sites of ‘rational’ communication (Warner 2005). Likewise, a medium can hardly be understood as a transparent carrier of communication. Printing, for example, cannot be distilled as ‘a culture’, because its very forms demand a variety of social practices.
This essay approaches Egyptian print history through ‘a reading’ of issue number 2 of the illustrated variety magazine al-Ithnayn, published in 1934, and focuses on the ocularcentric logic of the printed artifact itself. European approaches to printed texts, introduced to Egypt in the colonial era, inclined away from audiocentric modes of reading toward vision, ‘the noblest of the senses’, which were articulated with a Cartesian representational order that animated European modernity at key historical moments (Mitchell 1991). Yet illustrated magazines such as al-Ithnayn stood out from other kinds of printed texts, and invited modes of reading that were in some ways less ‘rationalized’ than those employed in the reading of other texts, but at the same time, they were more insistently visual and crucially performative. Whereas books are designed to be read primarily in linear fashion, and the structure of newspapers or periodicals invites indexical reading, the illustrated magazine facilitates neither linearity nor indexicality—both of which we might take as familiar manifestations of rationalization. On the contrary, readers of illustrated magazines are meant to meander and be entertained, not engage in the sober work of being educated or informed. My reading of juxtaposed images and textual contents of this magazine is informed by the concept of ‘flow’ in understanding the logic of the magazine’s layout (Williams 2003: 77–120; Stein 1992) and the idea of hypertextuality (in view of the magazine’s insistence on linking itself to audiovisual media as well as to the world of its readers) to analyze the specific content of this publication. Al-Ithnayn therefore helps us diversify our understanding of ‘print culture’. To be sure, the magazine was as embedded in the grand projects of modernity and nationalism as the printed material we understand as Islamic or modernist ‘thought’. In its periodical format it was a cousin of the newspaper, which ‘in its unrepentant commercialism … almost seems to have been devised to represent the pattern of variation without change, the repetitiveness, autonomization and commodification which, since the twin revolutions of the nineteenth century [political and industrial/technological], have marked fundamental patterns of our social existence’ (Terdiman 1985: 120). Yet the meandering reading necessitated by this form of printing operationalized an active, performative and personalized seduction of modern national subjects against (and often in opposition to) a backdrop of colonial domination, rather than the putative standardization of collective identity evoked by newspapers and by such terms as ‘print culture’ and ‘the public sphere’.
1 The Artifact
Al-Ithnayn was published by Dar al-Hilal, founded in 1892 by Jurji Zaidan, a Christian of Lebanese origin.2 Dar al-Hilal’s flagship publication was the monthly al-Hilal, which focused on history, science and culture. After World War I Dar al-Hilal began to expand its portfolio, as the reading public expanded and the technical facility to mix images of various kinds with text improved. The tabloid-sized al-Musawwar illustrated magazine began in 1924 and continues to our day. It tended to be fairly stiff and formal in its representation of Egyptians, focusing mainly on elite men. To the extent that it featured women, it depicted foreign women more often than Egyptians (Ryzova 2004–2005: 82–83). That soon changed. In the late 1920s Dar al-Hilal published an even larger format photographic magazine called al-Dunya al-musawwara; then Kull shay’ wa-l-dunya (a lighter illustrated news format that combined photographs with drawings), al-Fukaha (a humor magazine) and al-Kawakib (a film magazine, which sometimes also focused on sports). These were published from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. In 1934 the publisher consolidated its titles, discontinuing Kull shay’ wa-l-dunya, and combining al-Fukaha and al-Kawakib into a single weekly publication called al-Ithnayn—the title (lit., ‘two’,) refers to the two previous titles it assimilated, but may also refer to the day of the week yawm al-ithnayn, when the magazine reached the newsstands. Al-Ithnayn combined short stories, news of the theater, cinema and musical scene, the programming schedule of the newly nationalized radio,3 social and political commentary, caricatures, cartoons and poetry. Dar al-Hilal had imported printing technology that greatly increased its facility to juxtapose photographs, drawings and text. The sketchy estimates we have of press circulation in the period suggest that al-Ithnayn’s variety format was popular. It may have been the most widely circulated weekly of the 1930s and 1940s.4 The ubiquity of al-Ithnayn in Cairo’s used book market, which reflects what people owned and valued enough to keep, corroborates this estimate. Few people kept copies of daily papers—those were truly obsolete, as Anderson notes (1991: 35). But many people did keep weeklies and other periodicals, hence the apparently undiminishing supply of al-Ithnayn in the used book market, sometimes bound and sometimes in loose copies.
To reiterate, my purpose is to unpack a single issue of al-Ithnayn in order to discern how it functioned as a self-contained artifact. A magazine may strike us, conventionally, as unworthy of ‘a reading’, as if it were a piece of literature (a story, a poem, or at least nominally high-flown rhetoric) while it is an overtly commercial magazine that openly announces its intention to entertain. Elsewhere commercial periodicals had long served as a conduit for serializing literature, and throughout its history serious writers contributed to al-Ithnayn (for example, Mahmud ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad) and celebrity cultural figures were always an element of the magazine (Dougherty 2000). Whatever its content, al-Ithnayn sheds light on how the literary and cultural fields were constructed. Second, ‘a reading’ (as opposed to simply ‘reading’) implies audition reading aloud. The point is not to literally advocate reading an illustrated magazine aloud, but on the contrary, to draw attention to the fact that the logic of the artifact resists audition, while at the same time insistently places itself in an audiovisual sphere. I therefore hope to illuminate a particular and important instance of Egyptian media history, and at the same time illuminate this history more generally. In the context of a history of the senses, the function of this magazine was in some ways distinct from magazines generally.
Figure 1
al-Ithnayn no. 2 (25 June 1934)
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
Figure 2
Top left: al-Musawwar 43 (7 August 1925), comparing the ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq Usul al-Hukm controversy with the Scopes Monkey Trial in the United States. Top right: Special holidays issue (Ramadan and Christmas) of al-Musawwar (14 January 1934). Bottom left: al-Musawwar 184 (20 April 1928); cover featuring King Fuad I. Bottom right: al-Musawwar 181 (30 March 1928); The ‘Fair Sex Page’, featuring an English aviatrix, an Afghan queen, a model for Parisian fashion by Jules Poiret, actress Lillian Gilmore in tennis clothes (but no Egyptian women)
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
Figure 3
Left: al-Fukaha 17 (23 March 1927); Donkey Driver (to the tram): ‘Allah, Allah … We’ve turned a thousand times … Why don’t you turn just this once! … Allah, Allah …’ Middle: Kull shay’ wa-l-dunya 528 (18 December 1935); special students’ issue. Right: al-Kawakib 7 (9 May 1932); Egyptian actress Bahiga Hafez on the cover
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
2 Labyrinth and Flow: The Illustrated Magazine as Medium
In ‘The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-Class Women’s Magazine, 1914–1939’ art historian Sally Stein elucidates the essential non-linearity of the illustrated magazine:
It would be inaccurate … to describe most magazine reading as a straight, linear process; … The typical magazine is not organized along a single continuum. By sandwiching within its covers a variety of discrete texts, the magazine invites us to pick and choose, to move backward as well as forward, in a way that suggests that we not only will the process to continue by physically turning the pages (distinctly different from the more passive modes of radio and television reception), but that we also ‘freely’ negotiate a ‘personal’ path through the magazine labyrinth.
Stein 1992: 145
Stein’s analysis was inspired by Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘flow’ in television, by which he sought to analyze the logic of programming in American television. In his view the point of the programming was to blur the sense of watching discrete television events. The viewer would just ‘watch television’, including of course the advertising, which was all-important to the producers. In a flow, advertising became part of a steady stream of images in which the beginning and end were indistinct. Stein sees a precedent for this in the illustrated magazine. Her case study focused on Ladies Home Journal. By contrast al-Ithnayn was a variety magazine aimed at a wide market, one that was youthful, but not necessarily restricted to men. But the way it was ‘programmed’ resonates with Stein’s analysis.
Stein’s argument turns on the relationship between what she calls editorial content—articles; actual television shows for Williams—and advertising. Some of the pictorial content went with the stories, and some with the advertising. But the technique of producing this kind of magazine evolved. Some illustrations ceased being mere elaboration of the articles, and became independent texts themselves, which illustrated, commented on, or, in effect, changed the subject entirely.
Stein maps out her magazines to illustrate changes in the relationship between advertising and editorial content over time, showing that in 1914 the editorial content was much more discretely grouped than it was by 1929 (Stein 1992: 158–159). With the passage of time it became more difficult to read a page of the magazine without simultaneously browsing through unrelated content. The magazine became deliberately like a labyrinth: one could not read straight through in a linear fashion; one meandered. This kind of logic can be created spatially as well as textually. For example, today one finds it in global (originally Swedish) Ikea furniture stores, which are laid out to make a shopper walk circuitously through the entire store, in the process serendipitously encountering (and being tempted by) all sorts of products other than the ones the customer came to buy. Ikea (and al-Ithnayn’s discursive structure) is a refinement and intensification of a spatial/consumer logic that actually precedes our more contemporary iteration of the department store that facilitates both window browsing and with a store map (analogous to a table of contents), indexical access to specific products or content.5 The more labyrinthine spatial logic was pioneered not by Ikea, but in the nineteenth century, when ‘people on their way through the center of the busy city, generously protected by the arcades’ roofs from inclement weather, could in passing through the passages be tempted to consume’ (Terdiman 1985: 138).6 Hence the similar logics of consuming and journalistic form, discussed here in the context of al-Ithnayn, are by no means a haphazard pairing.
The contrast between non-linear Ikea marketing and indexical department stores mirrors a functional difference between periodicals and illustrated magazines. Consider, for example, the nineteenth-century periodical al-Muqtataf, a sober scientific magazine oriented to intellectuals. The periodical format was a product of the print age, and new in the sense that it was a preconceived empty form designed to be filled with new knowledge presented at regular intervals. It lent itself to an indexical organization. A table of contents for al-Muqtataf (e.g., Fihrist 1911) resembles a conventional department store guide that minimizes the distance visitors must traverse to reach any component of the whole. Its tabular grid-like form was an innovation in early twentieth-century Egypt, consistent with the Cartesian European order of colonialism (Mitchell 1991). Most importantly, for the present purpose, in the emergent print culture of modern Egypt al-Muqtataf’s novel indexicality can be contrasted with the labyrinthine nature of the illustrated magazine.
The manner of juxtaposing text to image in al-Muqtataf was unremarkable. Illustrations were coordinated with the text, and the text was placed hierarchically above the illustrations. For example, an article on the history of the English crown straightforwardly positioned illustrations in the text as a supplement (Tatwij Malik al-Inkliz 1911). Photos of crowns were not strictly necessary; they simply enhanced the information conveyed by the text. In this sense al-Muqtataf’s visual content was straightforwardly illustrative in the sense that images were contingent on the text. Illustrated magazines such as al-Ithnayn were distinctly different.7
3 Content as Diacritica/Identity as Performance
‘Flow’ associates texts and images in non-tabular, non-linear ways. In the context of television Williams distinguishes between ‘necessarily abstract and static’ distribution (2003: 86) and flow, ‘in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence’ (2003: 91). Distribution can be recorded in writing. Williams’ sample, taken from the BBC, divides programming into functional categories, such as ‘news and public affairs’, ‘features and documentaries’, ‘education’, or ‘arts and music’. ‘Flow’, by contrast, could only be experienced actively. Ideological agendas could be embedded in the relation of distribution to flow. In BBC programming distributional elements were clearly part of a cultural agenda controlled by the state. There were undoubtedly internal debates in the BBC to determine what went on air, but once all the ideological battles were fought behind the scenes, the program was fixed and tabular. The actual broadcast maintained the integrity of the distribution by using intervals—sounds or images signifying a break (Williams 2003: 90). The integrity of the ‘content’ was sacrosanct. The opera, the quiz show, the dramatic serial, the film—nothing that counted as ‘content’ could be interrupted. American broadcasting, by contrast, viewed the intervals opportunistically, not just by inserting different content streams into the intervals, but by actually creating points of insertion where there were none, within the content that the BBC kept discrete. Williams identifies the modern newspaper as a predecessor to the phenomenon of broadcasting flow (Williams 2003: 87), but argues that printed media still retained retains a sense of the discreteness of the article/event. But as Stein shows us, magazines fully operationalized a sense of flow long before American broadcasting took it to the airwaves.
What agendas could be expressed in interwoven content streams? In American television the commercial logic of advertising became predominant. ‘Content’ in American television functioned as advertising for the advertisements. This was not necessarily the case in al-Ithnayn, in which the mixture of content and commercial agenda was a less overbearing factor. Egyptian magazines were never financed predominantly by advertising revenue.8 Indeed, in the history of Egyptian media, from the advent of print to satellite broadcasting, the dominance of commercial profit from advertising was never straightforward. When a magazine sought to cover its expenses and perhaps make a profit (as opposed to functioning through the support of a patron, whether the state or an individual), direct sales may have been as important as advertisement revenue. Shechter details the growth of advertising, particularly in illustrated magazines, during the interwar era, but the increasingly important pursuit of advertising revenue was not necessarily an indication that publishing ventures could be self-sufficient through advertising, and did not necessarily reveal the balance between advertising on one hand, and personal, party and governmental subsidies on the other (Shechter 2002: 50).9
From the outset of an exercise in ‘reading’ an issue of al-Ithnayn, we must consider the function of images juxtaposed to one another on two facing pages. The point is not necessarily that they ‘cohere’, and one need not understand the magazine as a static expression of a unified subjectivity operating in a coherent public sphere. In television, according to Williams’ essay, flow sutures together content streams that a reader (or viewer) might not associate in the abstract: the opera and the soap advertisement; the didactic ‘family values’ serial with the Marlboro Man. With this in mind, we might ask whether ‘flow’ as employed by Williams and Stein can account for Egypt’s specific circumstances as depicted in a magazine. Williams advocated that we interpret the specific social uses of television, not engage in a blanket condemnation of the medium. Still, his main emphasis was on commercial American television, specifically the interweaving of advertising and content that created ‘a hurried blur’ (Williams 2003: 118). His goal was to construct a nuanced response to the common sense observation that television ‘can be seen as socially, commercially and at times politically manipulative’ (Williams 2003: 16). In other words, he acknowledged that television can be used as a tool of social control, yet contested the notion that the medium would inevitably be used that way.
Interwar-era Egyptian variety magazines employed the techniques of ‘flow’ that Williams and Stein outlined, but it was a relatively ‘slow flow’ of magazines that complicated Williams’ observation that ‘flow’ blurs the distinction between content and commercialism. It is true that on any two pages of the magazine a reader took in more than just ‘a text’. But the activity of reading, even if the nature of it is analogous to the semi-compulsory browsing of an Ikea store, was more deliberate than the activity of ‘watching television’, such that content potentially blurs into advertising. In television time is everything: ‘The major category of television is time’ (Doane 2006: 251). Television’s temporality is ‘liveness’, as a means of naturalizing distinctive forms of organizing the way images, information and narratives are distributed across a media space (Couldry 2004: 353). This is, however, an ideological effect ‘exploited in order to overcome the contradiction between flow and fragmentation in television practice’ (Feuer 1983: 14). The televisual flow may blur content and advertising, but television cannot function purely by blurring all broadcasts into a kind of TV soup. ‘Even television must have a way of compensating for its own tendency toward the levelling of signification, toward banalization and nondifferentiation—a way of saying, in effect, “look, this is important,” of indexically signalling that its information is worthy of attention’ (Doane 2006: 253). Nonetheless, while ‘flow’ must be contingent on the maintenance of some sense of event, in television the pace and timing of flow is determined by the programmer. By contrast, given the reader’s greater agency in apprehending the mixed content streams in al-Ithnayn, the magazine enabled reader-controlled juxtaposition rather than programmer-determined blurring—juxtapositions of social types, or indeed forms of social capital experienced as ‘packages’ of social types—the effendi, the ibn al-zawat (aristocrat), the ibn al-balad (literally ‘son of the country’),10 the fellah, even the khawaga (foreigner).11 The effect was not to appeal to an ‘Egyptian identity’ of an imagined reader, because Egyptian identity consisted of none of these; rather it emerged from relationships between them constructed in the act of reading rather than as a collective constellation of traits and dispositions ‘always already “there,” as something that individuals and groups “have” ’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 27). Identity consists of ‘a doing’ rather than ‘a being’ (Butler 1999: 33). In the case of the act of reading al-Ithnayn it is a ‘doing’ of the national, which is also modern and gendered. The magazine predisposed readers to ‘do the national’ by presenting them with an intrinsically open (yet ultimately bounded by the national) juxtaposition of diacritica—marks used to distinguish the performance of the self, a way of indexing the self in a social field.12 An ‘effendi’, to consider the most salient of these ‘identity packages’, is nominally the primary audience for al-Ithnayn. The term effendi is commonly glossed by historians to refer more or less to middle-class Egyptians. But an ‘effendi’ was less an objectified ‘identity’ than a discursive effect created through an idiom of public signs, performatively from both the reader’s perspective (largely inaccessible to us at least in terms of direct reactions to the magazine), and from the logic of the production itself. The contrastive effect of a reader-controlled temporal pace of the magazine’s flow enabled potentially counter-discursive readings. It did this by opposing public signs of a discursive ‘effendi-scape’ that indexed social categories normatively understood as distinct to the point of mutual exclusion (Terdiman 1985). In one sense an effendi, ‘as a historically constructed nexus of power relations and site of subject formation must be regarded as a moving vehicle; that is, sometimes the driver and destination were apparent, but at other times the vehicle appeared driverless, pursuing unanticipated directions with an uncertain destination’ (Jacob 2011: 6). Yet the metaphor of a ‘driverless vehicle’ perhaps understates the agency of Egyptians to make themselves modern on their own terms. ‘Doing the national’ (to paraphrase Butler’s formulation of performativity) was a self-conscious process, a ‘personal metamorphosis with far-reaching social and cultural consequences’ (Ryzova 2014: 6). ‘Claims on individual agency were key to efendi culture as a form of indigenous modernity predicated on its complex links to their local heritage and Western modernity alike’ (Ryzova 2014: 7). It is with this in mind that we turn to al-Ithnayn’s productively playful juxtapositions of content streams.
4 Content Streams in al-Ithnayn
The front cover of al-Ithnayn number 2 (25 June 1934) displayed an exaggerated image of non-modernity: a drawing of the face of a gypsy or what could be interpreted as a rather exoticized peasant woman (see figure 1 above). The convention of using a ‘folkloric’ drawing on the cover of al-Ithnayn was common in the first year of publication, but often the initial impression of invoking authenticity through rustic imagery was deceptive. Issue number one, for example, sported the smiling face of a quasi-shaykhly man with an ‘imma (turban), long white beard and galabiyya. But he was no anonymous folkloric image; he was Kish Kish Bey, a character played in the theater by Nagib al-Rihani, a prominent early Egyptian stage and screen actor.
We have already seen that al-Ithnayn fit into the history of Dar al-Hilal publishing as the product of an expanding reading public and the result of a proliferation of publishing niches that took place in the 1920s and early 1930s. As an illustrated magazine it inevitably compelled an intrinsically visual form of reading. As is apparent below, it also articulated with audiovisual mass media, specifically the radio (which was nationalized in 1934 and was undoubtedly connected with the launch of the magazine); the gramophone (or more precisely, recorded music) and the cinema. Figure 4 displays the inside front cover and first page of the issue. There is no advertising per se, but it exhibits a more complex kind of ‘editorial content’ than one encounters in magazines illustrated more conventionally. The pages suggest ‘hypermediation’ in the sense that the various elements in the visual frame created by opening the magazine point outside the page to other media. Hypermedia, usually thought of as a phenomenon of the digital age, can be linked to the concept of ‘remediation’—the re-use of older media by newer ones.13 Although there was no digital virtual sphere in the 1930s, there was nonetheless a proliferation of printed and audiovisual media,14 and in al-Ithnayn we can discern a capacity to call attention to the immediacy of such media as the cinema, but in an analog ‘windowed’ format that put an array of media forms at the reader’s fingertips. The capacities worked together by paying homage to, rivaling and refashioning earlier media.
Figure 4
al-Ithnayn no. 2: 2–3. p. 2: [film and theater star] Bahiga Hafiz: If I can’t top Greta Garbo should I shave my chin? p. 3 [former prime minister] Sidqi Pasha: Hello, hello? You’re who? Ibrahim Rashid? You say there are rumors of my death? And this is the second time? So what if I had died twice, or even three times. Why are you surprised! Don’t you know that I’m like the cat with nine lives?
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
With that in mind, let us return to issue 2 of al-Ithnayn. Specifically, on the right side of the two-page spread (page 2) we find a caricature of the actress Bahiga Hafiz, an early film and theater star, and also the daughter of an aristocrat. Hafiz played the peasant girl Zaynab in the film version of the novel Zaynab (Haykal 2008), which is often counted as the first Egyptian film (Karim 1930). The large peasant earrings Hafiz wears in the drawing echo the peasant woman on the front cover, but also reiterate many photographs of her that were printed in the illustrated press of the late 1920s and early 1930s. If one considers the image of Bahiga Hafiz in isolation, then we can see that to a striking extent the ‘advertising content’, if one insists on following Williams and Stein literally, does not point toward products, but to the cinema and the theater (but not current productions being ‘sold’). It also points to the new medium of photography, the more typical means of representing Hafiz at the time—a point that should perhaps also be linked to the advent of another new medium, nationalized radio broadcasting, in 1934, the year that al-Ithnayn was founded. In the operational logic of ‘slow flow’, a reader drawn to the image of Bahiga Hafiz had to ‘meander’ past the page opposite her. The ‘media streams’ on page three articulated with current events. One was a cartoon showing Sidqi Pasha on the telephone, talking to his secretary Ibrahim Rashid.
Sidqi Pasha: Hello, hello? You’re who? Ibrahim Rashid? You say there are rumors of my death? And this is the second time? So what if I had died twice, or even three times. Why are you surprised? Don’t you know that I’m like the cat with nine lives?
Ibrahim 1934
Sidqi was prime minister until the year before the magazine came out and was still an important political player in 1934. The ‘rumors of his death’ to which the text alludes related to his health; though he was widely despised when he was in power, for some, such rumors must have been wishful thinking. The article below the cartoon was political commentary by Husayn Shafiq al-Masri, editor of al-Ithnayn. Al-Masri’s comment is linked to the cartoon but is not a straightforward illustration of it. It is essentially a diatribe against fat-cat government officials who spend as much on a salad as an effendi makes in a day (al-Masri 1934a).
Figure 5
Back cover of al-Ithnayn no. 2, Greta Garbo
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
Perhaps another common part of meandering through the magazine is perusing it before opening it and possibly purchasing it. Hence the back cover can be seen as linked to the front cover. Figure 5, the back cover of al-Ithnayn number 2, displays none other than Greta Garbo. It was quite common in this period of publication for al-Ithnayn to use a local or even a ‘folkloric’ image on the front, and a foreign image, usually a glamorous one, on the back. In keeping with the performative logic of the magazine’s form, an image of Garbo can be seen as a diacritic of self-making, or of self-contrasting—there is no correct interpretation of the image. A conventional reading of this magazine as a container of referential content might well dismiss Garbo’s presence as a straightforwardly ‘Westernizing’ image—as a figure that must be reconciled with a coherent identity. We cannot know how any specific Egyptian reader of the interwar era interpreted Garbo, but the logic of the artifact, which we do have at our disposal, demands that Garbo be appropriated relationally and perhaps contingently. At a minimum Garbo on the back of the magazine links to the peasant woman on the front. One can meander past them both, either in perusing the magazine casually at the newsstand, or in passing through the content between the covers. In the constant movement that the illustrated magazine requires, two things happen. One is the same labyrinthine structuring of editorial and advertising content to which Stein alludes in her analysis of Ladies Home Journal, using Williams’ concept of flow. The logic of the artifact is to make the reader lose his or her way in the labyrinth. But second, some of the visual content works like icons pointing the reader to other media—particularly the media that Egypt was adapting to its own ends at that precise historical juncture—rather than trying to lose the reader in the magazine. Fixing ‘an Egyptian identity’ was beside the point; the magazine worked as a manual for self-fashioning.
5 Stories
A substantial component of al-Ithnayn in general throughout its 26-year history was fictional content. The stories were short, and usually set in contemporary society. They were often introduced and presented as if they were news reports. An example from al-Ithnayn number 2 is ‘Marriage is a Matter of Luck and Fate’ (‘Afrit 1934). Though entirely fictional, the story is illustrated with photographs, which lend it a documentary veracity, and thus suggest a blurring of the line between news and entertainment.
Figure 6
‘Marriage is a Matter of Fate and Luck’ (al-Ithnayn no. 2: 6–9); advertisement in lower left for special ‘magic’ issue of Kull shay’ wa-l-dunya magazine, another Dar al-Hilal publication
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
Here is a synopsis: The story focuses on an effendi who is extremely picky about women and therefore unable to fall in love because he wants perfection. One day while in Alexandria he is boarding the tram and spies a beautiful woman. An old Greek woman gets on; it is crowded, and she drops her bag of vegetables, spilling them all over the place. The beautiful woman gracefully helps the poor old Greek woman, and thereby proves that she has moral worth to go with her beauty. For the protagonist it is love at first sight, but the object of his infatuation gets off the tram before he can find out where she lives. All he can do is return to the stop where she got off and search the neighborhood until he finds her. Finally, one day he spots her as she is going into a dentist’s office. He follows and pretends to be a patient. It turns out she is one of the dentists, and he lets her examine his teeth. She informs him that he has six bad teeth, and they must be pulled. The man is horrified but agrees to the operation because he cannot stand to leave the woman. She refuses to go through with it, admitting that she lied about his teeth because she had fallen in love with him and could not bear to send him away. He tells her that he knew all along that there was nothing wrong with his teeth. How did he know, she asks? Because, he says, he is a dentist too! They are, it seems, truly a perfect match.
The story touches on one of the thorniest issues of the times, namely the problem of ‘the effendi’s woman’. The term ‘effendi’ is often glossed as ‘middle-class’, but this convention understates the cultural and historical specificity of Egyptian effendis of the interwar era. There was no obvious female term to pair with ‘effendi’, compared to other ‘identity packages’ of the period, such as ibn/bint al-balad (son/daughter of the country).15 In referential terms it pointed to a type of person: ‘traditional’ urban folk, independent tradesmen, those who were either illiterate or minimally educated in a traditional kuttab Quran school, located spatially in an unmodernized hara (a neighborhood in ‘old Cairo’ as distinct from the newer neighborhoods coveted by the effendiya).16 An effendi, by contrast, was defined substantially by his engagement with modern education, but access to education for women was still relatively limited in the interwar era. Hence narratives of the time often addressed the problem of marrying ‘down’ to a ‘non-modern’ woman marked by the diacritica of bint al-balad, or of marrying ‘up’ to an aristocrat tainted with the diacritica of the ‘faux-foreigner/faux-Egyptian’ ibn/bint al-zawat boundary straddler.17 The cultural productivity of the boundary straddler is what moves many a narrative of this period, which is to say that such a ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1999: 36) was a problem that called for resolution. Real effendis, as opposed to narrative constructs, were rarely ensconced in what we might think of as homogenized ‘middle-class habitats’, but were rather perched uncomfortably between, on one hand, much more powerful social actors (office managers, free professionals, aristocrats) who could afford the trappings of modernity, and on the other hand, neighbors and family members who bore the diacritica of the ‘traditional’ worlds that the effendis saw themselves as striving to escape.18 The story must therefore be read across this constellation of social positions marked by specific diacritica that open possibilities for assuming a range of subjectivities. The constellation is only implied, in this case by the advertisement on the bottom of page 9 for the special sihr (magic) issue of Kull shay’ wa-l-dunya, another variety magazine format published by Dar al-Hilal. Sihr is the functional equivalent of the gypsy woman on the front cover; a baladi counterpoint to the modernizing story. It was not necessarily something to be embraced by the effendi readers of al-Ithnayn or Kull shay’, but was at the minimum an ‘identity package’ against which the self could be expressed. But all this is implicit in the story itself. ‘Marriage is a Matter of Luck and Fate’ (the title itself is playful and semi-colloquial) can be read as a tale of the honor-obsessed effendi who in fact lives in a hara, a traditional ‘alley’, not the spatial diacritic of the effendi as an aspirational category, but rather the ‘back streets’ redolent, in referential terms, of non-modernity.19 For both the effendi-as-reluctant resident of a hara and the effendi-as-national-subject suffering the throes of a ‘marriage crisis’ (Kholoussy 2010), the perfect woman must be morally pure. But the story also invokes the thoroughly modern effendi for whom the perfect marriage is of the companionate variety, a union that can only be entered into freely by equals in modernity.
Figure 7
‘The Innocent Criminal’ (al-Ithnayn no. 2: 14–17)
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
This brings us to another story from issue number 2 of al-Ithnayn: ‘The Innocent Criminal’ (Abu Naddara 1934). In this case the tale is related by a narrator/journalist as if it were a ‘real crime’ reported in the papers. Again, I give a synopsis: A burglar is caught stealing clothes and dishes from a lawyer’s house. The thief claims to be a journalist. Nobody believes him, but the narrator knows the thief, and knows that he is in fact a journalist. More than that, he is an ambitious writer who wants to write ‘real Egyptian’ stories rather than plagiarize stories from Europeans. The narrator appears as a witness at the burglar’s trial and tries to defend him on the grounds that he is trying to have ‘real’ experiences of crime and prison in order to write realistic novels. The burglar denies it. Then the judge’s daughter comes onto the witness stand and testifies that the burglar has indeed stolen: he has stolen her heart. She and the burglar are lovers, but her father won’t let them marry because he wants her to marry her cousin (her father’s brother’s son). The judge’s verdict is that the burglar and the lawyer’s daughter must marry. The girl’s father protests that a journalist isn’t good enough for her. The judge tells him ‘that is wrong; a journalist is suitable for daughters of the most elite people’. The story ends with the narrator going with the girl and the ‘burglar’ to the registrar (ma’dhun) so he can witness their marriage.
The complex system of self-construction through positioning in relation to diacritically marked ‘identity packages’ is very clear in this story. It raises anxieties about authenticity (the burglar is ostensibly concerned with writing ‘real Egyptian’ stories). It positions the reader against blind tradition (the father who wants to marry his daughter to her paternal uncle’s son, the stereotypical traditional marriage formula). It enables a love match (implying a companionate marriage in the making), and yet engineers the ‘perfect arranged love match’ by resorting to the judge’s verdict that they must marry. The story also valorizes the modern profession of journalism through its ‘true crime’ presentation.
Of course the content of the stories may echo the performative potential of the illustrated magazine, but on its own it does not create the sense of flow that Williams and Stein describe for television and Ladies Home Journal respectively. The drawings here essentially illustrate a text in a conventional way. Stein’s ‘Graphic Ordering of Desire’ article suggests that the mixture of editorial content with advertising in an illustrated magazine could change over time. Her diagrams mapping the proportion of content to advertising suggest a fairly straightforward teleology for Ladies Home Journal: always toward ‘faster blurring’, which is to say an ever-greater mixture of content and advertising, as the commercial logic of the magazine became progressively more dominant. Williams suggests the same for American television, but also notes the contrast between the American commercial system and the state-funded BBC; in other words, there are always alternatives, and the medium itself does not dictate a specific use.
But ‘The Innocent Criminal’ in al-Ithnayn was in fact positioned in a flow rather than as a discrete event. As the reader finishes a story that conjures such narrative elements as the promotion of ‘real Egyptian’ writing and the dilemma of forced marriage to one’s paternal cousin, on the other side of the page one ‘meanders’ past a gift poster of the American actress Sylvia Sidney.20 If we accept that the effect of the illustrated magazine is one of ‘flow’ (or possibly more of juxtaposition in the case of the magazine) rather than of ‘event’, then while it is impossible for us to sit and look over the shoulder of a 1930s Egyptian reader, nonetheless the logic of the artifact does give some clues about the experience of reading this story, and more generally, illustrated magazines.
Figure 8
al-Ithnayn no. 2: 30–31. Left: Advertisements for Haro Pens and Kruschen Salts (an herbal medicine). Right: ‘He’s Sleeping Heavily; Let’s Wake Him.’ Poem by Abu-Buthayna (Muhammad ‘Abd al-Munʿ im Zaki)
Citation: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 15, 1-2 (2022) ; 10.1163/18739865-01501002
6 Advertising
As previously mentioned, in its first year al-Ithnayn carried little advertising in comparison to American publications. What appeared tended to be grouped at the back of the magazine.21 In figure 8, for example, we see ads for Haro pens, and Kruschen Salts, probably an electrolyte replenisher to help prevent heat cramps. These were consistent with a ‘universal trend in which the most highy advertised items … were patent medicines and cosmetics’ (Shechter 2002: 48). There is, presumably, value in these for historians of material culture and consumption, and both advertisements give some insight into the process of accruing social capital in interwar Egypt. Whatever their significance to readers, the logic of the magazine was to ensure that the reader did not experience the images in isolation. Rather they were juxtaposed to editorial content, in this case a colloquial poem titled ‘He’s Sleeping Heavily; Let’s Wake Him’, by Abu Buthayna (Zaki 1934).22 The colloquial quality of the poem itself socially indexes its readers by assuming a national/populist register. Its topic, radio broadcasting, began at the same time that the magazine itself appeared on the market. Here is a translation:
Zaki 1934
He’s Sleeping Heavily; Let’s Wake Him
At first the radio was like getting a bad shave
now it has become an exalted institution from which we take lessons
A voice which the people of Europe and the Syria hear
not like before, when it felt like we were going to sleep
Now we listen to something fine, rising up without bashing [our ears]
whoever resists it is in error or stupid
At first the radio was recorded on disks, like the phonograph
now we hear every singer, of every type
Fathiyya [Ahmad], and Suma [Umm Kulthum], and Salih Abd al-Hayy and lots more23
if you heard them in the theater you’d go broke and your salary would fly away
Listen to them at home with your kids and your friends
listening to them will cost you no more than a millime
I’ll speak my mind with complete frankness
in sha’ Allah the studio director will tell me ‘come say it here’
If the director invited me to be on the show
I’d say ‘there’s something that bugs me, and I’ll say it because I’m a listener’
Why don’t you broadcast the Quran in the morning
if Shaykh Rif’at is sleeping heavily let’s wake him up24
Also, we don’t want long boring sermons
we want just to learn grammar and inflection, and with a long explanation
And it’s not right to bring on someone who doesn’t talk about everything that’s new
we’re bored with that and want to make a spirit of renewal
And why, sirs, so little instrumental music
we want lots of it to satisfy our hunger for fine art
If you’ve got a complaint, come on, send it in, don’t hide it
don’t keep it in your heart, no, no, no, don’t hide it
That’s all I can say for now, I’m tired
and to you, a thousand greetings and felicitations.
The playfully didactic poem recalls an effendi culture with its own musical icons, which the poet juxtaposes to demands for religious content, perhaps implicitly referencing the Muslim Brotherhood, an effendi Islamic movement in its first flush of popularity in the 1930s. There is, in short, much historical value in the poem. But for our purposes, remember that it was not experienced in isolation. The reader encountered civic and national pride together with Haro Pens and a health product. Each of them—the pen, the medicine and the poem—is a potential diacritic that can be mobilized performatively; in other words, the reader is encouraged and even compelled to ‘browse’ an implicit market of diacritical resources.25
7 Audition and Vision
Having gone through some of the content of the magazine—enough to gain a sense of its logic of active self-fashioning as a printed artifact; enough to establish both its kinship to the Western form from which it was adapted as well as some of its specific valences in Egyptian society—I now take a much broader view of printing, and by extension, the role of this kind of production. Al-Ithnayn was an insistently visual artifact, containing virtually no content without illustrations. Many pages are more visual than written, and there were many pages in which textual material, following the logic of flow, essentially juxtaposes a separate semantic track than the visual material, such that an understanding of the full impact of written track must account for the presence of the visual material. In addition, there is a sense in which the textual material must also be understood as visual. Any two pages of the magazine, spread open before the reader, contained not a juxtaposition of words and image, but rather a juxtaposition of two visual practices. Reading itself was a more visual practice in 1934 than it was in 1834.
In other words, understanding how al-Ithnayn was read requires us to consider how it demanded different skills than the manuscript culture that preceded twentieth-century print culture by just one or two generations. In brief, precolonial Arab-Islamic textual culture emphasized audition—reading out loud in the presence of other human beings. By ‘emphasized’ I do not mean to imply that reading had to be done this way, and I certainly do not mean to raise the false question of whether people ‘could read silently’.26 The point is rather that literacy, and by extension, the way people read, is not a singular phenomenon. Literacy and reading practices certainly vary across cultures. Even in a literate culture such as that of precolonial Arab-Islamic society, they also vary across historical eras and between genres of writing.
There were, however, certain broad patterns of literate culture discernable throughout precolonial Arab-Islamic societies. Literacy itself was initiated through audition and memorization of the Quran, and audition was a key technique in religious disciplines such as the study of hadiths. Even today learning the Quran (generally accomplished through memorization before it can be studied) and pedagogical practices associated with religion put a high premium on audition.27 Other branches of knowledge and genres of writing emphasized audition to varying degrees.
But if it is reasonable, with all caveats duly expressed, to assert that a broad audiocentricity prevailed in precolonial Arab-Islamic writing cultures, then the point that must be articulated here is that since the onset of European colonialism textual practices in the Arab-Islamic world have been steadily pulled into a more ocularcentric mode; the convention of the spoken text shrank at the expense of the silently read text. We do not have a nuanced scholarly grip on the relationship of audiocentrism to ocularcentrism in modern Arab-Islamic societies, partly because the rise of ‘print culture’ is taken for granted. One way to attain greater nuance, then, is to appreciate that the contrast between European ocularcentrism and Arab-Islamic audiocentrism underpins the history and ethnography of colonialism. While my purpose in this paper is to illustrate this contrast through a single issue of a very common magazine, it is worth mentioning that what is at stake can be expressed as a stark epistemological contrast between, on one hand, ‘European order’ instantiated in the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, and on the other hand, the embodied moral and intellectual authority of Arab-Islamic societies.28 Or to put it more plainly, at some level, this paper is about a technique of colonization, though in my opinion al-Ithnayn was as much an appropriation of colonial technique as a vehicle of colonization. Thus, while I have not attempted to discuss this magazine extensively in the relatively grandiose terms of the ‘European order’, the colonial imposition of European order is nonetheless an important meta-context within which my discussion of al-Ithnayn, including its visuality, takes place.29
In more concrete terms, a historical shift from audition to silent reading was tied to the spread of the printing press; the size of the literate public steadily expanded due to mass education, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage. The printing of texts in and of itself was not necessarily a decisive factor in the replacement of audiocentric textuality by ocularcentrism. A medieval manuscript produced in a social milieu geared to audition can be printed, and of course many have been. Nominally, a printed manuscript may not indicate how it should be read, or at least this would be the case if a manuscript text were transferred verbatim to the printed medium.30 Most materials printed in the Arab world over the past century and a half or so have been new works rather than editions of older manuscripts.31 The problem we face is the relative neglect in scholarly literature of Arab ‘print culture’ and its relation to other media as well as to the manuscript culture that preceded.32 We tend to read for content—magazines, periodicals, books, archived documents of various kinds—and that, too often, is the end of the story. The entire formation of the press has ‘seemed to go without saying. What they speak has become so deeply internalized within us that the origins of their utterance, and of the practices of reading and perception they have taught us, appear diffused through the social formation—without any specific locus, transhistorical, attributable to no one’ (Terdiman 1985: 118). Implicitly, we see school as the primary vehicle for instilling new practices of reading and writing. But ‘print culture’ was produced not only by the school; part of the agency of the Egyptian reader was exercised in the choice of reading material outside schools, and al-Ithnayn was one of the most eagerly embraced instances of this choice.33 A text in a printed book was as accessible to the audiocentric reader as to the ocularcentric reader; an illustrated magazine could only be read by the ocularcentric reader because it required practice in apprehending content streams in both textual and image forms. This could only be done by an individual with the magazine open in front of him or her. Analyses of early print culture in the Arab world often emphasize the ‘multiplier effect’—the literate reading to the illiterate in public spaces. There could be no multiplier effect for an illustrated magazine, because audition of its text was pointless without the presence of the various visual tracks that accompanied it. ‘Flow’ in this instance could only be experienced by an individual ocularcentric reader.
8 Conclusion: Performance, ‘Print Culture’ and ‘the Public Sphere’
For Raymond Williams ‘flow’ was about suturing commercial agendas to narrative content. One watches television to ‘watch a show’ but comes away having absorbed a product. As Stein notes, ‘flow’ operates also in reading illustrated magazines. Yet it must be said that the pace of ‘watching television’ differs from reading, particularly in its temporality. Programmers dictate the pace of a television broadcast; readers dictate the pace and mode of taking in juxtaposed images that may not be in direct dialogue with each other. Illustrated magazines resist the linearity of books, and unlike newspapers, are not designed to facilitate access to exactly the information a reader desires (the sports page, not the editorials; the local news, not the foreign news). This raises doubts about a straightforward application of Williams’s claim about the ‘blur’ created by television flow for the illustrated magazine. A juxtaposition of content streams on a two-page spread of an open magazine opens intriguing possibilities, but the magazine unfolds at the reader’s pace, not at the programmer’s, thus it is at least an exaggeration to say that a printed medium creates the same sort of blur between content streams as commercial broadcast television. However, it can facilitate implicit (or sometimes very pointed) contrasts: local (folkloric, vernacular, or baladi), highbrow (fasih—‘eloquent’ in linguistic contexts) and foreign (colonial), potentially with as many shades and nuances as the reader can supply. The diacritica echo life, and there was no other modality of print culture that juxtaposed them with the facility of the illustrated magazine. One could be a cosmopolitan and ‘identify’ with Greta Garbo in opposition to Bahiga Hafiz; a nationalist, and oppose Bahiga Hafiz in favor of Garbo; a populist, and take the side of the gypsy woman against the faux foreigner Bahiga Hafiz. The same person could assimilate any of these at different moments, depending on circumstances.
The significance of this cannot be understood in the conventional scope of print culture. Print culture nominally articulates easily with the concept of a public sphere, and with other rationalizing projects. In this vein nationalism seeks to rationalize time and the human contents of a national space. In a nation the public sphere mediates between a rationalized private sphere and an unproblematically coherent state. ‘Print culture’ is the rationalized medium of the public sphere. It goes without saying that such nested rationalizations are now viewed with suspicion; few scholars put much faith in them without making significant qualifications. The imperative to rationalize now more often looks like a violent process than the outcome of progress, and explaining what gets lost, or how people refuse to comply with modernist or nationalist agendas is the more compelling tale to tell.
It may be that our lack of reflection on how mediation contributes to Egyptian print culture is the product of assuming that the forms of printing and practices of producing and reading printed materials are borrowed (or imposed, depending on one’s perspective) from Europe. There is no question that this is true of the illustrated variety magazine, of which al-Ithnayn is an important instance. But even so, we might instead regard the importation of printed forms and their associated practices as the starting point in an analysis of Egyptian and Arab print culture and media, rather than a point of closure, after which we simply mine the content of whatever document we have before us.
We implicitly assume that formal institutionalized education is the primary vehicle for instilling new practices of reading and writing. But ‘print culture’ was produced not only by schools; part of the agency of the Egyptian reader was exercised in the choice of reading material outside schools, and al-Ithnayn was one of the most eagerly embraced vehicles of this choice. Analyses of late nineteenth-century print culture in the Arab world often emphasize the ‘multiplier effect’—the literate reading to the illiterate in public spaces (Ayalon 2016: 184–193). But there could be no multiplier effect for a 1930s vintage illustrated magazine beyond simply lending a copy of a magazine to another reader. Audition of its text—a salient feature of precolonial pedagogy and reading, at least for certain important genres—was pointless without the presence of the various visual tracks that accompanied it. ‘Flow’ was intrinsic to the medium, and in this instance could only be experienced by an individual reader most likely scanning silently, taking in both text and image streams.
The performativity of al-Ithnayn was also part of its capacity as a particular kind of printed artifact and an associated culture. Performance in reading is sometimes seen as a function of audition (e.g., Johnson 2000: 616). But issue number 2 of al-Ithnayn and, to varying degrees the entire span of the magazine’s production up to 1960, was predicated on hypermediation and remediation in a primarily visual medium. First, hypermediation in the sense that al-Ithnayn deliberately placed itself in a field of other types of mediation, ‘horizontally’, in homogeneous empty time as Benedict Anderson (borrowing from Walter Benjamin) called it (Anderson 1991: 24). But not just with respect to a national community, rather with respect to other media—radio, recorded music and cinema, but implicitly also other types of printed media experienced in more linear or tabular formats differentiated from the entertainment function of the illustrated variety magazine. Second, it was remediation in a more vertical sense historically speaking, a re-purposing of older media, anachronistic imagery, and also ‘imported’ imagery and media with their own histories. The logic of the artifact required readers to traverse a printed labyrinth, and in so doing to connect images and text in their own ways. Text and images spread across two pages in front of a reader now seems completely ordinary. But in the emerging print culture of modern Egypt the technology of putting words together with images in this way created a unique palette for constructing selves in a field of contingent other-ness.
Schwartz (2017a) summarizes assumptions (largely mirroring studies of European book history) and debates about the ‘revolutionary’ nature of printing in the Middle East.
The history of Dar al-Hilal as an institution can be found in ‘Izzat (2010). My description of Dar al-Hilal’s magazine line-up also draws on my own collection.
Private radio broadcasting was in operation from 1926 until May 1934, when the national service began broadcasting and all the private operators were shut down (Boyd 1993: 16–17, 38–39).
In Ayalon’s table showing estimates (from a variety of sources) of the circulation figures for various dailies and weekly publications between 1822 and 1947, al-Ithnayn’s 1947 figure of 120,000 made it the leading weekly of his survey period by a considerable margin (Ayalon 1995: 148–151). Shechter shows that the dominance of Dar al-Hilal was longstanding. In 1931, prior to the publication of al-Ithnayn, the circulation estimates for Dar al-Hilal’s illustrated magazines were as follows: al-Musawwar 21,000; Kull shay’ 19,000; al-Fukaha 15,000; and al-Lata’if al-musawwara 12,000–14,000. Of the weekly magazine competition only al-Muqattam (10,000–15,000) reached five-figure levels (Shechter 2002: 60).
The ‘next-level’ intensity of Ikea’s formulation of the consumer labyrinth is the subject of numerous jokes in the form of internet memes (visual/textual digital nuggets that multiply and evolve, on the metaphor of the human gene) (‘25+ Best’ 2021). Many of them simply show an Ikea store map as a maze, sometimes with a comment, in one case a panel showing Gandalf from The Lord or the Rings warning the traveler, ‘do not stray from the path no matter what happens’ (Ikea Meme 2021).
Terdiman’s Discourses/Counter-Discourses resonates with (and pre-figures) my analysis of al-Ithnayn by examining ‘two networks of words and practices, subsystems of the nineteenth century’s emerging dominant discourse: the early mass daily newspapers; the nascent department stores and the consuming practices they introduced. They were closely interrelated’ (Terdiman 1985: 118).
This is not to say that some Arabic literary texts related to visuality in more complex ways. For example, Bray writes about ‘picture-poems’ (mudabbajat) characterized by ‘textual interweaving, and the use of colour and of geometric or natural shapes’ (Bray 2019: 248), that each element was related to the basic text, yet distinct from it. Bray describes the texts in question as ‘performative’ verbal art that requires ‘substantial effort of readers, and involve them actively in the construction of the text/artwork’ (Bray 2019: 260). The effect could be described as one of juxtaposed content streams analogous in some ways to the hypertextuality of illustrated magazines. But the high level of expertise required to engage with mudabbajat—so high that the author had to provide instructions on how to ‘extract’ the visual patterns—is, as is explained below, the opposite of the open-access logic of magazines.
On the economics of print-age publishing in the Arab world up to the mid-twentieth century see Ayalon (1995: 190–214). Ayalon’s more recent book on printing devotes only a few pages to advertising, focusing on advertisements specifically for printed publications rather than on revenue generated by advertisements more broadly (Ayalon 2016: 135–140).
In the Arab world a relative lack of salience in private self-sufficiency through a combination of sales and advertising has been historically pronounced across all media. For example, Egypt’s pre-eminent filmmaking institution in the interwar era, Studio Misr, never produced enough films even to fill demand in its one theater; it operated instead as a source of rent and sought (and eventually received) government subsidies (Vitalis 2000; see also Flibbert 2007). Radio, after a brief period of private broadcasting in the 1920s, was nationalized in 1934 and remained a state monopoly until recently. Television was a state-run enterprise from the onset of broadcasting in the early 1960s until the late 1990s, but since then satellite television broadcasting in the Arab world has been big business without necessarily being only profit-driven. It is rather characterized by a low volume of advertising and interpenetrating spheres of private and state control, which often amounts to control by ruling families, making a strict accounting of resource allocation and hence actual profits difficult (Sakr 2007: 165–202).
There is much literature on the concept of ibn al-balad (e.g., Armbrust 1996: 37–62; Booth 1990; Messiri 1978; Early 1992). A productive gloss for ibn al-balad is ‘one of us’. Balad in this construct is polysemic, evoking a variety of levels of imagined communities connected situationally to class (‘real Egyptians’ as opposed to ‘faux Egyptian’ aristocrats), contemporary social states (‘the non-modern urban folk’ as opposed to ‘modernized’ effendis) or even to nationalism (all Egyptians as awlad al-balad, as opposed to foreigners).
The term khawaga increasingly acquired a pejorative sense, rather like ‘gringo’ (the disparaging Latin American term for North Americans from the United States).
Indexical rather than referential or symbolic meaning is a key feature of performativity as the concept evolved in linguistic anthropology (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 60). While al-Ithnayn is not speech per se, speech acts can be understood to encompass both spoken and literary communication (Bakhtin and Medvedev 2005: 148). Performance approaches to language emphasize the importance of texts, including literary texts, in context (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 66–72). My approach maintains that al-Ithnayn comprises a corpus of texts formally predisposed to playful self-construction, and that this can only be understood in the context of emerging Egyptian national modernity.
Bolter and Grusin focus on digital media in two ways: ‘immediacy’ (the imperative to create virtual worlds as similar to actual life as possible, so that an individual has no sense of experiencing media—media become transparent), and ‘hypermediacy’ (calling attention to multiple forms of mediation). Both are paths to ‘remediation’—the reuse of older media by newer media (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 21–50). They argue that hypermediacy was present since the European Renaissance in playful and secondary forms, and that it only became salient with the advent of digital technology’s capacity to present ‘windowed’ media (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 34). Al-Ithnayn constituted a pre-digital foregrounding of hypermediacy.
Photography was a vernacular medium with the most obvious capacity for people to manipulate themselves, through studios but by the interwar period also as a very popular middle-class practice (Ryzova 2015). Other media, including most forms of writing (though not the form discussed here), fell more easily, if misleadingly, into the pattern of ‘empty containers waiting to receive small dollops of referential content’ (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 65).
On the problem of ‘the effendi woman’ see Ryzova (2004–2005); on the cultural history of the effendiyya more generally, see Ryzova 2014. The effendi’s predicament, stemming empirically from a relative deficit in comparably modern-educated women who were roughly equal to the male effendiya in terms of class and social/cultural capital, was articulated in the inter-war Egyptian press as a ‘marriage crisis’ with important implications for the emerging nation-state (Kholoussy 2010).
In the broader context of colonial modernity ibn/bint al-balad was a complex term. Balad is a situational term, indexing spatialized collectivities ranging from a village to the nation. In practice anyone could be an ibn/bint al-balad, depending on the nature of the collectivity with which a person sought to claim authenticated affiliation.
The straddling of socially constructed boundaries creates a ‘problem’ that demands resolution through cultural work. In classic anthropological writing resolution took the form of either sacralization or abomination (Douglas 1999). In more contemporary terms we understand ‘cultural work’ more flexibly, as a necessary element of such concepts as hybridity, ambivalence and third spaces.
As Ryzova points out, this makes the effendiyya ‘men with a mission’ (2014: 237–258), and also potentially imbued them with a revolutionary impulse that eventually saw its political expression in the Free Officers’ seizure of power.
Effendi life in the putatively non-modern parts of Cairo is the subject of novelist ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s al-Shawariʿ al-khalfiyya [Back streets] (1958), which is set in 1935. Ryzova uses al-Sharqawi’s work to emphasize the messy emergent character of the effendiya as a category, in contrast to the notion of effendiya as a fully-formed ‘middle class’ (2014: 228–234). The film al-‘Azima (Karim 1939) depicts precisely the transitional state of the effendiya contemporaneously with al-Ithnayn in its first years of publication.
Sidney began acting in 1929 and continued taking roles up to a year before her death in 1999. The text on the page mentions that she starred in the films Madame Butterfly (1932—she played the role of Cho-Cho San) and Jennie Gerhardt (1933), and that she was preparing to appear in a film version of Salome (which appears to be a role she did not get, according to her filmography). Magazines in this period often betrayed a certain fascination with Oriental narratives (Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern), and with the actresses who appeared in them (Armbrust 2008).
Stein indicates a similar configuration for Ladies Home Journal in 1914—editorial content was clustered at the front of the magazine and advertising appeared at the back. Advertising in al-Ithnyan ebbed and flowed over time, but never reached the same level as in the more fully commercialized American magazines.
Muhammad ‘Abd al-Munʿ im Zaki (Abu Buthayna) was a popular satirical colloquial poet active in the press and as a lyricist of the munulugat genre, particularly during the 1930s (Bakr 2018).
These were star singers of the day, previously known through gramophone recordings, which imposed strict boundaries on the length of songs, boundaries that did not very well reflect the conventions of much longer live performances. Radio introduced mass audiences to live concerts that more closely approximated their performances.
Shaykh Muhammad Rifʿat was a leading Quran reciter in the interwar era. The national radio broadcast began in late May (a few weeks before the publication of al-Ithnayn) with him performing a live recitation. Subsequently he contracted to conduct two daily live recitations in 1935 (Ibrahim 2016).
The final element on the page is the continuation of a feature that started earlier in the magazine, called Maglis al-Ta’dib—disciplinary court (al-Masri 1934b). Like the Abu Buthayna poem and the two stories (one of which I omitted), it is quite long, and I do not examine it here. Briefly, Maglis al-Ta’dib is a humorous and carnivalesque ‘disciplinary court’ that acts as a forum for discussing politics. For an analysis of this feature see Dougherty (2000).
Silent reading without vocalization no doubt could have been done at any point throughout Islamic history, and indeed can be done in any textual tradition. I seek to pre-empt such a question precisely because the capacity to read silently has not always been taken as a given. European classicists long debated whether or not scholars in European antiquity could or did read silently. But the real issue is not capability; probably all trained readers in any textual tradition are capable of reading silently. The issue is rather the character of textual conventions—of both production and use—in which case audition (a more useful term than ‘orality’ precisely because it need not be opposed to ‘literacy’) may have a more central role in some traditions than in others, and indeed in some genres within a tradition more than others. Johnson (2000) usefully summarizes the debate in European scholarship, noting in conclusion that the sometimes heated polemics between champions of silent reading and advocates of reading out loud make no sense once one accepts the proposition that such labels as ‘reading’ and ‘literacy’ cannot be considered unchanging practices over the millennium or, it might be added, cross culturally.
For example, Nelson’s The Art of Reciting the Quran (2001), which emphasizes the primacy of the Quran as a spoken text, was based on historical practice evident in writing and on more or less ethnographic accounts of modern practice.
See Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt (1991) and Messick’s Calligraphic State (1993). These are analyses of the interface between European colonialism and Arab-Islamic societies (Messick’s book is not exactly an ‘ethnography of colonialism’, but it is nonetheless predicated on a contrast between European order brought to Yemen indirectly, initially through the Ottomans, and embodied textual authority). Their terms of reference are different than mine: for them, European Cartesian order (particularly in Colonising Egypt) and embodied authority (in The Calligraphic State, but the concept is also invoked by Mitchell) rather than audiocentrism/ocularcentrism. In both cases ‘European order’ is synonymous with the rationalization of objects (including words) into a spatial grid accessible to vision and the contrasting (Arab-Islamic) cultural system.
For additional discussion of the importance of Middle Easter audiocentrism in the context of European (colonial) ocularcentrism see Armbrust (2012).
Yet printed editions of manuscripts are rarely if ever mere transferences of handwritten texts to printed text. The labor of printing editions of texts written in the pre-print age inevitably introduces implicit features of ocularcentrism; in other words, texts were oriented more firmly to silent readers than they may have been in their original form, through the addition of annotations, divisions in the text to facilitate reference (rather than reading entire chapters or even longer works from beginning to end), and punctuation, also for the purpose of making it easier for readers to scan texts and to relate various parts of a written text to other parts. While this is beyond the scope of this paper, what makes a text amenable to either silent reading or conventions of audition have been explored in the European context (Saenger 1982; Johnson 2000).
Though Schulze notes that the initial impulse of early print publishers in Istanbul and Cairo was to produce printed copies of manuscripts, ‘the original, a commentary, glosses and sometimes even super-glosses (matn, sharḥ, ḥâshiya, ta’lîqât). This technique permitted timeless continuity of an original text’ (Schulze 1997: 48). But, he continues, publishers quickly discovered that the more widely dispersed and less expert customers for their printed books placed little value on the commentaries, so they rapidly shifted toward favoring new works without commentaries (Schulze 1997: 48).
But it is only relatively neglected. Schwartz (2015; 2017a; 2017b) explores the political economy of printing in its transitional phase from the manuscript era, arguing in empirically-informed historical research against the sort of technologically determinist approaches that plagued contemporary studies of satellite television news and social media. In her view, printing in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire evolved through the contingencies of local conditions and needs rather than in response to imposed or imported technologies that ‘revolutionized’ communication and media. Yousef examines the history of literacies in the plural, insisting that they should be understood as existing ‘along a continuum of practices and context that often include multiple valences of orality and textuality’ (Yousef 2016: 5). The effect, as in Schwartz’s project, is to move away from binaries such as literate/illiterate, or print/manuscript, and in consequence to better understand the history of books and literacies in less teleological ways than we have tended to do in the past.
Yousef (2016) discusses a range of other ways that nominally illiterate people have interacted with spheres of literacy, such as through scribes, petitions and communal literacy practices. Ryzova writes of ‘auto-efendification’, by means of popular culture, including extracurricular reading (Ryzova 2014: 163–165).
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